Day 67 | Lessons 5-7 (User Experience)

These next three lessons were very brief, so I decided to lump them all together in this post.

A main theme that has been occurring in these videos is the number one rule of making sure that your visitors know what the website is about. One way to do that is make the summaries clear and concise, that means not using big words.

Using big words doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m attracting intelligent visitors, and it doesn’t make me more intelligent. Rather it has an adverse effect for the readers portraying me as less intelligent because I’m not putting my information in a way that others can understand.

My information, especially on the homepage, needs to be clear, simple and to the point.

Another good rule-of-thumb is to not use more than three levels of heading (i.e. h1, h2, and h3) when laying out my website. If I end up using more, I’ll probably need to consider splitting the information up onto different pages. Secondly, provide summaries for each page so that visitors can quickly work out what the information will be about.

When it comes to the body text, a good style of writing to use is one that I’m familiar with through my studies in college. The inverted pyramid.

You start with the whole story in the first paragraph (can be more, but not much more). This is where all the relevant and the important information is located. The next is more in-depth details of the information presented, while the final part is general background. This style was used in the news place when editors and writers didn’t know how many column inches they’d have for a story, so they could just cut off from the bottom of the story (the less important news) to make more room.

In lesson 6, the only interesting information I gained from that is using the five-second test when laying out the website. The five-second test is allowing a visitor to the view the homepage of the website for five seconds, then see if they were able to gain what the website is about from that short viewing.

Finally in lesson 7, when you give summaries on different pages of the site you will obviously want links to those pages, and the easiest way to help navigate your viewers to that site is too leave the links in the summaries. This lesson talked about the best way to do that is by making the subheadings clickable and making it noticeable by using a different colored font with an underline rather than using words like “Read more…” or “Click here.”